Unconditional Love — an exploration of lessons learnt | by Chris Hardy | Sep, 2021Unconditional Love — an exploration of lessons learnt | by Chris Hardy | Sep, 2021

Unconditional Love — an exploration of lessons learnt | by Chris Hardy | Sep, 2021

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Zoom back in time six months and I’m with Lucy, an angel from Turkey with whom I’m exploring intimacy and getting to know each other. We’re kissing and naked together in candle lit Temazcal, the stones still heating the space, wrapped in a blanket of copal and coconut oil.

Before further intimacy unfolds we hold the conversation around our desire, boundaries, needs and vulnerabilities, and any other relevant relationships we should know about before we continue.

Lucy informs me she is married. It’s a curve ball and unexpected. I had assumed she was single and available as I was in the midst of thoroughly falling in love with her.

In that moment there was something of a choice:

A. continue with our intimacy knowing that I would be a temporary feature on her landscape of love. A meeting that wouldn’t last, a deep sharing that was contextualised in her marriage (which was on an agreed break at this time) and that, by agreement and necessity, would only be temporary. OR…

B. we pause our intimacy calling further exploration off and continue as friends.

There wasn’t a choice. We continued to explore and I knew there would be inevitable pain.

Over the following four weeks, from full moon to full moon our relationship unfolded into a deep love for each other. Lucy taught me a huge amount in a short space of time. Most centrally she shared her wisdom on unconditional love. Her grounding and centred-ness allowed me to see my hitherto unconscious conditioned responses and thought patterns around love.

‘I’ll love you and share intimacy with you… so long as you don’t see your husband again.’

‘I’ll have sex with you… so long as you choose me and not your husband for the rest of your life.’

‘I’ll love you and be intimate… as long as I’m the only one and your husband doesn’t get a look in anymore.’

Surprised by the limiting and restrictive nature of these thoughts I was able to examine them and make them object. Making beliefs and thought patterns ‘object’ means to hold them up for examination; putting them on the research table we can assess if we want to live from these patterns any longer.

Do they serve us?

Do they serve me?

Does it serve me to think about love in this way?

Why am I thinking about love in this way?

Where are these thoughts coming from?

Impossible to do alone, and impossible to do without Lucy being such a rock of stability, clarity and love, I was gifted the chance to live into something new, a new way of loving. An exploration into unconditional love.

Not easy (let me tell you, I had many a melt down and some moments of real deep lasting and substantial sadness) and yet fundamental to my own growth and freedom I was able to experiment with living from new kinds of belief structures.

What if unconditional love is only something that exists in this moment?

What if I am able to love Lucy unconditionally right now and not think about the future?

What if both myself and Jason (her husband) can both love Lucy fully and unconditionally?

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